Dr. Sarbeswar Sahoo is working as an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erfurt (Germany) and Charles Wallace Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore and has held Visiting Fellowships at University of Groningen (Netherlands), University of Cardiff (UK), University of Muenster (Germany), University of Erfurt (Germany), Roskilde University (Denmark), Queen’s University Belfast (UK), and NUS (Singapore). His research interests include Neoliberalism, Sociology of Development, and Sociology of Religion. He is the author of Civil Society and Democratization in India (Routledge, 2013) and Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
During his Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship, Dr. Sahoo aims to compare the experiences of Bhil Pentecostals in India and Black Pentecostals in the US and discuss how different cultural contexts influence peoples’ lived religious experiences and how Pentecostalism is transforming the everyday socio-political lifeworld of people at the margins. A comparison of the Bhils with the experiences of Black Pentecostals in the US will help us understand not just the “contextual” nature of religious experiences and activities, but also the relationships between religion, state and secularism.